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Posted by Rob Mania on
September 8, 2018

The New York Times published an anonymous op-ed which tried to convince the American people that, don’t worry, there are adults in the room with Trump.

No, there are not.

Adults have authority over their children. Children have to listen to adults, Trump listens to no one. When an adult says to eat your broccoli, a parent can withhold ice cream or video games or whatever. This situation is more analogous to that Twilight Zone episode (also parodied by The Simpsons) where child has magic powers and all the adults are afraid of him.

I could give dozens of examples of Trumps refusal to submit to authority, but I think one is particularly telling. When Trump finishes reading a paper, he rips it up. While this may work for a business person as a weird filing system, as the president, all his notes must be saved for the National Archives, so staffers must reassemble the notes and tape them back together like a jigsaw puzzle. Trump has been told this, he just doesn’t care. This is just petty bullshit, but that’s Trump acting like a child, and no adults in the room are sending him to his room without any dessert.

The hand-wringing that the author of this piece does is galling. He wants Conservatism to succeed, but hopes it can survive Trump. What Conservative values? Tax cuts for the extremely wealthy while cutting any kind of social program that can help poverty more bearable and refusing to raise the minimum wage? Hiding behind the “the troops” for rhetorical cover while cutting funds to the VA? The irrational hatred of Hillary Clinton specifically? Denying that climate change is real? Taking away women’s autonomy over their own body? What, pray tell, are these Conservative values that are at odds with the Trump administration’s policies?

Make no mistake: Trump (or someone like Trump) has always been the endgame of Conservatives since Goldwater. The racism/sexism/homophobia/xenophobia/overall bigotry, the crony capitalism, the religious hypocrisy, the distrust in the government (even though many accept its benefits),the deference to an authority figure, and the quasi-religious unwillingness to accept certain true things that happen as the truth. Any Conservative that has reached a level of popularity that the average person knows there name has at least some of those qualities.

Just to name a few, take a minute to think about Newt Gingrich, Rush Limbaugh, George W. Bush, Sean Hannity, Bill O’Reilly, Rudy Giuliani, The Westboro Baptist Church, Joel Osteen, Sarah Palin, and of course, Mike Pence. If anything, the reason John McCain and Mitt Romney didn’t win the support of conservative voters is because they weren’t big enough hypocrites!

This article, although purportedly about the resistance within the White House to Trump’s wildest impulses, is really just the author doubling down on the Conservative values that brought us Trump, but trying to distance himself from the man himself. He or she (actually, it’s most definitely a he) is preemptively trying to make the case the next Donald Trump won’t be Donald Trump. Well, I’m going to make a bold prediction here that whether it’s Mike Pence or anyone else, the next Republican presidential candidate will be just like Trump in all the ways that matter.

Trump is what Conservative politicians have been grooming conservative voters for for decades. And if they are going to insist that Trump is not exactly what they’ve been asking for since Reagan rather than recoil in horror and yell, “What have I done?! What madness have I released upon the world!?” that’s their delusion. And if these so-called adults think sending a dog whistle through the New York Times op-ed page is anything but cowardice, that’s also their delusion. If you can’t deal with shit, don’t have a baby.

If whoever actually did write this op-ed, and the at least 12 people Trump think wrote that piece, don’t publicly stand up and announce that they are either quitting his administration en masse or stand in front of Congress and invoke the 25th Amendment, or even (and I know this is a liberal jerk-off fantasy) publicly admit that Russia did the whole thing and ask for Hillary Clinton to accept the vice-presidency pending Trump’s imminent impeachment, then they have done nothing, and they have allowed evil to triumph.

Robert has followed business technology for nearly ten years, and consumer tech for many before that. He has done extensive work for growing small businesses, shaping the voice that others will follow. Rob Mania has been waiting by the door for opportunity to knock, killing time by playing video games. So far it has not.